I am the middle of three girls; my mother was the middle of three girls; my grandmother was the youngest of three girls, I have three girls! I don’t know that I ever thought about it before I started my genealogy journey. It will stop however with my daughters as two of them do not plan to have children, and my one granddaughter is a sperm donor baby carried by my daughter’s partner.
There were close to five years between me and my siblings, and three years between my daughters (we really could have planned better because it meant two in college at the same time). When I look back at earlier generations, the number of children in some of the families is mind-boggling. I have 30 families with 10 or more children and 155 families with 6 or more children and many of these families had children who died young. My 2x great uncle had 9 children, 5 of whom died before their 2nd birthday. This, of course, does not only happen with large families...my grandfather was the only surviving child of three and it appears that his parents' marriage did not survive. Childhood mortality was a huge issue the farther back you go, but perhaps it’s an indication of a genetic disease. I wonder with these two families (one is maternal and one paternal) if they might be an indicator of my cystic fibrosis gene.
I also uncovered one instance where two sisters married two brothers after they emigrated to Argentina and many instances of siblings emigrating via chain migration…one emigrating and sending money home to bring the next sibling. In one case an earlier emigrant returned to Ireland to bring her youngest sister to America.
It’s always important to research every member of a family, not just your direct ancestor. If you’re looking to identify the locality in Ireland, it may be a sibling that left that information. It was from the obituary of a half sibling that I discovered that the Dalys from Irishtown were in County Mayo. I discovered that a client’s family was from Tipperary based on a female baptismal sponsor (with a different surname). The child was born in Upstate New York and the sponsor turned out to be the child’s aunt which I uncovered through a land record. Following up in the census I found that she was married in Ireland and her first two children were born there. Then through church records I found her marriage and the baptismal records for her first two children in Tipperary, Ireland. These examples (and many more) are why siblings are so important in your research.
Happy Hunting!
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